Category Archives: Conferences

Video recordings of sessions from the Future of Law School conference, which took place September 26-28. 2013, at the Faculty of Law, University of Alberta, have been posted.

Keynote speakers included: Gillian K. Hadfield, from the Gould School of Law at the University of Southern California; Richard Susskind billed as an Independent Scholar & Advisor; our own Harry Arthurs whose talk was called “The Future of Legal Education: Three Visions and a Prediction”; and William Henderson, from the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University.

Dean Lorne Sossin also spoke in the Practices panel with a talk entitled, “Experience the Future of Law School.”

F. Tim Knight, Head of Technical Services, Osgoode Hall Law School Library

It has a fantastic event which began with the Information Commissioner of Canada, Suzanne Legault, speaking about the need to update our antiquated Access to Information Act which came into effect in 1983.

Suzanne Legault, Information Commissioner of Canada

She emphasized that the Act “must be modernized” to meet the current expectations
concerning access to information in the 21st century and needs to be extended to cover administrative aspects of parliament, ministers and court administration.

Since government is the largest consumer of its own information, improvements in this area would also improve the overall operation of government. She feels it’s an important debate to initiate so that issues surrounding access to information, transparency, secrecy, and national security can be publicly reviewed and discussed.

Other highlights included an introduction to CanLII‘s recently released web API and a few demonstrations of the API in action. An overview of some of the challenging processes behind CanLII‘s receipt of case law from the many jurisdictions involved was also provided.

A hackathon was held on the second day and I had a wonderful opportunity to shoulder surf and learn some valuable Ruby programming techniques from Matt Leduc. We worked on pulling information from the CanLII API and converting the metadata to RDF/XML for potential inclusion in a legal linked data cloud. Very close to success on this one. Thank you Matt!

RDA (Resources Description and Access) is a new way to support resource discovery focusing on user tasks in the digital age. RDA, the new cataloguing guidelines have been developed, tested and are set to be implemented in March 2013. As we shift away from AACR2 preparation for training is underway and cataloguing records created using the new rules will start to appear in your library catalogues. F. Tim Knight and Darren J. Furey guide you through the changes you can expect to see including an overview of FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) the conceptual model that underlies the structure of RDA.

The PowerPoint slides and speaking notes of the presentation are now available.

“The Google Book Project in general, and the proposed settlement reached by Google and the plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed against it in particular, have already generated a great deal of controversy. Most of the debate, however, has focused on US law and policy, whereas very little attention has been given to the implications of the settlement for Canadian readers and authors. This one-day conference will begin filling this gap and explore the implications of the Google Book Settlement for Canada“.